Dynamic transition in deposition with a poisoning species

In deposition with a poisoning species, we show that the transition to a blocked or pinned phase may be viewed as an absorbing transition in the directed percolation (DP) class. We consider a ballistic-like deposition model with an active and an inactive species that represents its basic features and exhibits a transition from a growing phase to a blocked or pinned phase, with the deposition rate as the order parameter. In the growing phase, the interface width shows a crossover from the critical W ~ t behavior to Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scaling, which involves DP and KPZ exponents in the saturation regime. In the pinned phase, the maximum heights and widths scale as H_s ~ W_s ~ (p-p_c)^{nu_//}. The robustness of the DP class suggests investigations in real systems.